BTW: We do of course have helicopters with THREE engines as well! Spawn of the devil I say!! Burn 'em!!!
US Navy Mine Sweeping CH-53E's do a pretty good job of that all by themselves I hear. Something about the center engine exhaust starting fires.
http://hamptonroads.com/2014/03/navy...ngine-problems
One works, Two is fine, Three is Divine, and when Four becomes standard then it shall be Bliss!
I firmly believe One cannot have too many Engines or too much Fuel.
The problem is paying the cost of carrying them around unnecessarily.
In general terms AnFi is entirely correct.
You can do everything with a Single that you can do with a Twin, except fly following an Engine Failure.
One does not have to be a Wizard to understand the advantage of two engines but as Anfi correctly notes, sometimes the two Engines do share a common link that negates the value of both of them.
Case in point, the Main Drive Shaft on a Bell 212/412 for instance. It fails and you have two very perfectly healthy engines doing nothing but keeping the electrics supplied and reducing the amount of fuel you will crash with.
Beating up on AnFi seems to be a popular activity here but he does have some good points amongst the many.
Don't blind yourself to that in your knee jerk reaction to his posts.
Any review of Accident Statistics will show Pilots to be the greatest hazard these days. We must not lose sight of that and that applies across the board for
all types of helicopters.
You folks in the UK have the Glasgow Police Crash and the London Crane Crash to use for examples and we have the Air Methods EMS Crash we can look at.
All three were had common elements and involved both twins and a single.
Texting in the Air Methods and London events, fuel exhaustion in the Glasgow and Air Methods crash. That the Air Methods crash involved both Texting and Fuel Exhaustion is especially troubling to those of us who consider the Pilot to be the weak link in most fatal crashes.
Just because the aircraft has two engines, lots of automation or just a single engine and few gadgets, it still requires a Pilot to do right in both situations.
Now do you want to argue Single Pilot or Twin Pilot Ops?
I would suggest most of you are looking the wrong way for an answer to the questions.
The 139 crash had nothing to do with Fuel or Engines (from all available information) so how does that figure into the discussion about Singles vs Twins and Single Pilot vs Two Pilots?